Especially in the early part of her career, Dr. Peretz worked with Amusic patients (many congenital) and explored the neural constraints imposed by this lesioning to musical abilities. I had anticipated that one with such deep interests in music and neuropsychology would have a childhood that was surrounded by musical parents and scientific excitement.

Dr. Peretz describes her parents in the following two clips. That is followed by a third description of her early aptitudes and interests:

As she says, “that explains everything!” During her childhood, Isabelle’s mother didn’t get music, didn’t want music around her, actively discouraged involvement with music. Possibly because her mother suffered amusia and was neurophysiologically incapable of processing music. Instead of an early life filled with music (or perhaps even driven by an absence of music) the young Isabelle absolutely and necessarily endeavored to make music a focal point in her life and scientific career.

Setting her mind to that goal is all well and good, except that we need to consider the scientific world at this time (mid-1970’s). There was no BRAMS lab, there was no Centre de Musique and Neuroscience. The emergence of the neuroscience/neuropsychology of music emerged during, and due to, the emergence of the careers of Dr. Peretz, Dr. Robert Zatorre, and handful of other talented scientists. There was the start of a Psychology of Music from pioneering scientists like Dr. Diana Deutsch, and, as young Isabelle considered her educational opportunities, she even visited Dr. Deutsch at the University of California, San Diego in beautiful San Diego, California as a prospective student. But this was not to be: the educational approach, cultural approach, the structural design of the university, felt somewhat alien to Isabelle. She was not prepared to leave Brussels, Belgium just yet and jump into an exciting scientific space that was so distant.

Instead she embarked on an experimental Psychology program at University Libre de Bruxelles working with her graduate mentor, Dr. Jose Morais. He was studying literacy, speech, and in a department dominated by a fairly important figure in Psychoacoustics, Dr. Paul Bertelson, who did much of the early work on the ventriloquism effect and related phenomena. As a new student, Isabelle came to her mentor with her plan to work on the Psychology of Music.

I know that hindsight is 20/20 (or 6/6 in metric) and that if we knew then what we knew now that there are all kinds of little adjustments one might make. I certainly wouldn’t have eaten all that extra poutine last night. Certainly, eating some poutine is very enjoyable. Eating the sampler of 28 different poutines just to really “get to know the variety” is too much. I get that now. But I digress.

So here, Isabelle came to her mentor and asked to study music. And he said “no” so she pressed ahead with it anyway gaining his support in the process. It’s an impressive amount of determination — especially for a student — and that seems to have been a hallmark for her work to come. Still, the hindsight we’ve gained would seem to indicate that early support and encouragement of her pursuit of these topics might have been warranted.

There is more to tell from her student life: the kinds of research she started on (amusia wasn’t yet a thing and she certainly didn’t yet have patients), the ideas that excited her, and the misogyny from some of the important faculty in that department. Important topics that I look forward to revisiting in more depth.

Dr. Peretz had to find a way to understand this disorder and clinically demonstrate the many critical implications it had. This began the formation of a new idea in perception: that music is special, like speech. If speech is modular, isolated in the brain and in its functioning, then music would appear to meet the same criteria. It took the work of Dr. Peretz to slowly and systematically chronicle case after case of people with amusia to make that argument, and it started with CN. Her HM.

Like HM, there was some struggle to convince the scientific community, as described here:

Again, there is much more to tell, and hearing Dr. Peretz describe her work is completely charming. I look forward sharing so much more with you, but, then again, so does she! As ever, she’s got some big ideas in the works and it was exciting to hear her describe them. I can’t wait!

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Published by Michael Gordon

Dr. Michael Gordon is a Professor of Psychology at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His research on Sensation & Perception emphasizes auditory and audiovisual detection (e.g., psychomusicology, psychoacoustics, speech, auditory navigation, collision detection, echolocation). He is working on a new project to capture the voices and ideas of prominent and influential Psychologists who have shaped the field.
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